Pickles are still everywhere, after a year of frantic Pickle-mania. And younger folks are acting as if the craze is something new. Well… I’m old enough to remember when most folks grew and made their own Dills…
When I was a kid, everybody made their own pickles. And lots of ’em!
Every spring, Dad drove fat-headed nails halfway into the top and bottom rails of the fence at the back of our vegetable garden. Then, he ran rough, brown jute string up and down between them, creating about 30 fence-ft. (10 metres) of ‘V’s, or ‘W’s, or ‘M’s, depending on how you looked at them. That rig would be ‘home’ to our annual planting of yellow wax beans and pickling cucumbers…
In a pickle…
My parents grew up during the Depression. Mom on a farm, and Dad in a semi-rural home with a huge back yard, on the outskirts of Toronto. Both families – like most of their neighbours – grew big vege-table gardens every year and preserved a cellar full of food to last them over the winter.
Different folks ate different fruits and veggies. But almost everyone made dill pickles.
What sticks out in my memory is the way the house smelled of vinegar for days after Mom’s annual pickling ‘bee’. Kids today wouldn’t stand for that. They’d complain up, down and sideways, until their parents went nuts. That’s probably one reason younger folks – even those who like to cook – don’t make their own pickles anymore.
Nevertheless…
Back in the day, home cooks served their pickles at every opportunity, at lunch with sandwiches, and supper with all manner of mains and sides. Pickles were not just welcome, but expected!
Then, over many decades, folks got busier, Moms started working regularly outside the home, veggie gardens became a thing of the past, and nobody made their own pickles anymore. … Even I, as I grew up and grew older, grew out of the mindset that pickles were something you made yourself.
Bless you, Grandma…
Gen Xers and younger folks today talk about the alleged therapeutic benefits of drink-ing pickle juice. Deli aficionados lament the decline in the quality of their favourite Kosher Dills. And the foodies ex-tol the ‘greatness’ pickles on everything, and pickle-flavoured everything.
But I still remember how heavily my Mom, and my grandmothers, relied on pickles in their daily kit-chen routines. Without putting them front-and-centre…
I try to promote the responsible use of pickles and their byproducts. One of the most impressive ex-amples of that rule in practice, to me – while, at the same time, restrained, subtle and super-delic-ious – is from the ‘family legacy’ category. I refer to Dad’s Mom’s mayo hack: adding a dash of pickle juice to the mayo-based dressing for her legendary potato salad, along with a pinch of sugar.
Together, those two ‘trace elements’ turned ‘good’ into ‘magical’.
Less is more
That relatively old rule is also important to keep in mind when cooking or assembling dishes using pickles. You’ll recall, Grandma needed only a teaspoon or so to work her magic.
Use sour pickles in any dish and you can easily overdo it, drowning out the actual flavour of the food with the add-in. But try sweet bread-and-butter style pickles, and you get a whole different result. They’re sweetness cuts the hard edge on any acidic or spicy dish just enough to balance bold flavour profiles without cutting the overall power or umaminess. Sweet pickles are naturally ‘Swavoury’… Maybe that’s why ‘Hamburger Relish’ – made with sweet pickles – complements hamburgers so well.
My take
I’ve suggested a line of thought for using pickles judiciously but effectively. I hope you’ll take a moment to review my recommendations next time you think about adding pickles to a dish.
Above all, never make pickles the ‘star’ of a dish. Therefore: No pickle-flavoured soda. No pickle-flavoured ice cream. No pickle-flavoured instant Ramen. No pickle pizzas. No, no, NO!
~ Maggie J.